Pandora update brings new UI

Pandora has just released a much-welcomed update to its popular music app in the Google Play Store today. The update brings a completely refreshed and refined UI experience, that thankfully now follows Android 4.x guidelines, getting rid of the menu button and adding an overflow button on the right side of the top action bar. Behind the scenes, this update also adds the ability to review, rate and bookmark tracks in your song history and gives you access to full song lyrics and artist biographies.

Visually, the app looks great -- especially when considering how it looked before. Everything is smooth and works properly. As we noted, the legacy menu button is gone and replaced with a proper Android 4.x overflow button. There are several nice touches in the smoothness of the app when moving between windows and a very subtle feature that uses a sliver of the bottom of the app to show the track progress. Pandora has also done something slick with the volume control. Instead of simply overlaying the phone's volume slider, they take control of it and put their own slider at the bottom of the app even when using the hardware volume keys. It auto-shows and auto-hides when you're done switching. We're quite impressed with the progress Pandora has made here, and we hope more app developers can take note.

Check out a few screenshots of the refreshed UI after the break, then hit the Play Store link above to install it on your own device.